Did you know that ecommerce businesses worldwide generated $5.2 trillion in 2024? Online sales are projected to grow by 50% in the following years to reach a whopping $8.1 trillion by 2026. We are talking about a vast and competitive market.
How do you succeed in such a market, then?
If you manage and run an ecommerce business, you might be under the impression that you did all you could to make your shop easy to discover and boost sales. Let’s see if you’ve tried the following tactics to supercharge your online shop and set it up for success.
Make an effort to understand your customers better.
You need actionable customer information to make good decisions regarding your online store optimizations and improvements. You need to know who they are, discover their needs and preferences, and learn how they interact with your website.
Doing market research and creating an ideal buyer persona is an excellent start. However, doing more than that will be beneficial.
Fortunately, you can easily collect data these days. Free tools such as Google Analytics can help you turn your online store into a data-gathering hub. You can see who visits your shop, which product pages have the most views, the source of traffic, and what causes shoppers to abandon your site.
With all this data at your disposal, you can make informed decisions. Furthermore, you can use the data to make on-site optimizations, fine-tune your offer, and personalize the shopping experience for your customers.
Leverage email marketing
With all the website builders and tools available today, you probably know how easy it is to create and launch an online store. However, having your store up and running is only the beginning.
Now you need to market your offer and attract prospective buyers.
One of the best marketing channels to do so is email. Email marketing provides you with an opportunity to build a list of prospects, leads, and customers and always keep them in the loop with special offers, sales, and new arrivals. Create a registration form to enable online shoppers to subscribe.
You can provide an incentive for them to do so. For instance, you can offer a one-time discount code to all who subscribe. If you want to step up your email marketing efforts, you can use unique software for this type of marketing. It will help you automate and personalize your messages.
Follow best ecommerce merchandising practices
Merchandising is not exclusive to brick-and-mortar retailers. Your online customers interact with your online shop the same as in physical stores. They like to browse, clearly see what’s on sale, and be able to spot new collections in a split second.
You shouldn’t only display your products in alphabetical order. With a website, you can choose from many options. You have the freedom to experiment with different merchandising tactics and even display personalized offers to your shoppers.
With tools such as Fast Simon, you can completely automate merchandising for your online store. These tools use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help you further optimize merchandising. For instance, you can make products with high sales velocity more prominent and hide products the moment they go out of stock.
Use a chatbot to delight customers
Did you know that almost 50% of online shoppers would buy a product by interacting with a chatbot? That’s a compelling statistic. In brick-and-mortar shops, customers can get help instantly.
However, when browsing an online offer, they need to make an extra effort to get assistance – search for FAQs, send an email, or call customer support.
You can make shopping more convenient if you add a shopping assistant available to customers round the clock. Yes, a chatbot will keep serving your customers and answering questions even when you and your entire staff are asleep.
All you have to do is enable live chat on your online store and add one of many affordable wholesale eCommerce chatbots. Most of these chatbots come with configuration presets you can use out of the box to enable the functionalities you need.
Enable omnichannel sales
As an online shop owner, you must acknowledge that every consumer is unique, especially regarding a preferred shopping channel. Some customers will find your online store more than enough to do some shopping. However, others prefer shopping on social media, via email, or by phone.
If you want to offer a seamless shopping experience to your target customers, you should consider enabling omnichannel sales. It will help you deliver a consistent shopping experience to all customers regardless of how and where they decide to reach out.
Since most consumers have a smartphone these days, you should focus on mobile sales at the start of your omnichannel sales strategy. Make sure that your online store is mobile-ready and that mobile shoppers can place and track their online orders even on the go.
Focus on search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy to help you make your online store more visible. With proper SEO, your store’s rank in search engine results pages will increase. More customers will discover your shop, and you will generate more leads and ultimately boost conversion rates.
If you run an online store on a popular platform such as WordPress, you can use SEO plugins to optimize your pages, product titles, and descriptions for targeted keywords.
You may find SEO confusing if you don’t have experience with it. That’s why you should consider working with an SEO freelancer specialist when running a small store or a company specializing in SEO when running a big ecommerce site.
The most challenging part of any SEO strategy is identifying which keywords to target. Keywords are the terms your potential customers use when searching for products online. Once you have the keywords, you can add them to your website copy. You can also create articles incorporating those keywords before publishing them in your blog section.
Establish a social media presence
Billions of people worldwide use social media such as Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram daily. One of the best ways to drive new visitors to your online shop is to engage them where they like to spend time, similar to what Temu did, as they share their stories on their YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@temu
Your first step is to create social media profiles on relevant platforms. To identify social media platforms relevant to your business, you must go back to your market search and dive into your audience’s demographics.
You can share some compelling blog posts, product reviews, and important news on your social media profiles. However, you will often use social media to launch paid advertising campaigns.
Conclusion
While supercharging your ecommerce business is not an easy task, it’s a straightforward one. You must truly understand your customers to custom-tailor your offer and shopping experience. The customer data can help you launch a personalized email marketing campaign.
Additionally, you can use chatbots, follow the best ecommerce merchandising practices, enable online sales, and use SEO to build a successful brand and boost your sales. The most critical thing to understand is that these are not one-time fixes. They are long-term strategies you can improve over time to get the best results.